2008 Tanglewood Jazz Festival

[dawn singh]

February 15, 2008

TICKETS FOR ENTIRE TANGLEWOOD SEASON ON SALE FEBRUARY 17—VISIT WWW.TANGLEWOOD.ORG

BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA ANNOUNCES REMAINING PROGRAMS: 2008 TANGLEWOOD JAZZ FESTIVAL TO FEATURE DIANNE REEVES,
TERENCE BLANCHARD, DONAL FOX, CHRISTIAN SCOTT, ELIANE ELIAS, EDDIE DANIELS, MARK O’CONNOR, JANE MONHEIT, MARIAN MCPARTLAND,
EDMAR CASTANEDA, AND JOE LOCKE, AMONG OTHERS


Cunard® Line is the Official Cruise Line of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Sponsor of the Tanglewood Jazz Festival

When the 2008 Tanglewood season goes on sale on Sunday, February 17, music fans will be able to order tickets to all Boston Symphony Orchestra concert presentations (details available at www.tanglewood.org), including the newly- announced Tanglewood Jazz Festival August 29-31, Labor Day Weekend. Jazz greats highlighting this year’s festival include Dianne Reeves, Terence Blanchard, Donal Fox, Eliane Elias, Eddie Daniels, Mark O’Connor, Jane Monheit, Marian McPartland, Edmar Castaneda and Joe Locke. All shows will be held in Seiji Ozawa Hall. Tickets for the entire Tanglwood season, include the Jazz festival, go on sale Sunday, February 17th.

Photos and bios of the Tanglewood Jazz Festival artists are available at tanglewoodjazzfestival.org/presskit.

Opening the festival Friday, August 29, at 8 p.m. will be Colombian harpist, Edmar Castaneda, and his trio featuring vibraphonist, Joe Locke. Pianist Eliane Elias will follow performing material from her highly acclaimed CD, “Something For You,” a tribute to Bill Evans.

On Saturday, August 30, at 2 p.m., Marian McPartland celebrates her 90th birthday in the seventh annual live taping of “Piano Jazz” for NPR. Ms. McPartland will have several very special guests for this performance who will be announced at a later date.

Saturday, August 30, at 8 p.m., pianist and composer, Donal Fox, will perform his Scarlatti Jazz Suite Project with special guest, trumpeter, Christian Scott. Renowned vocalist Dianne Reeves takes the stage in the second half of the concert.

The Sunday afternoon concert on August 31 will open at 2 p.m. with clarinetist and saxophonist, Eddie Daniels, and his quartet. The concert continues with violinist, Mark O’Connor, with special guest jazz vocalist Jane Monheit in her Tanglewood Jazz Festival debut in a show titled “Hot Swing.”

Closing the festival on Sunday, August 31, at 8 p.m. will be a Tanglewood exclusive—a very special concert by trumpeter and composer, Terence Blanchard, with a 30-piece orchestra performing the material from this year’s Grammy winning CD, “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina).”

Tickets for the 2008 Tanglewood season go on sale Sunday, February 17, and are available by calling SymphonyCharge at 888-266-1200 or online at tanglewood.org and in person at the Symphony Hall Box Office. The Tanglewood Box Office in Lenox opens June 13. For further information, please call the Boston Symphony Orchestra at 617-266-1492 or visit our website at tanglewoodjazzfestival.org.

Cunard Line, whose fleet comprises The Most Famous Ocean Liners in the World®, the magnificent Queen Mary 2®, the legendary Queen Elizabeth 2®, and its newest ocean liner, Queen Victoria™, is the official cruise line and sponsor of the 2008 Tanglewood Jazz Festival. In a legendary time known as The Golden Age of Ocean Travel, crossing the North Atlantic onboard a Cunard ocean liner was a grand journey, rich with possibilities and a distinct sense of adventure. The epitome of a privileged, international lifestyle, a Cunard voyage encompassed the finest in contemporary entertainment, cuisine and culture. Today, Cunard offers all the glamour and excitement of that time on an even grander scale with modern-day amenities beautifully complementing Cunard’s impeccably cultivated atmosphere of British tradition making Cunard the preferred choice of elegant travel.

The Tanglewood Jazz Festival is sponsored by Cunard and JazzTimes Magazine.

2008 Tanglewood Jazz Festival
Ticket Prices

Friday, August 29, 8 p.m.
The Edmar Castaneda Trio with Special Guest, Joe Locke
Eliane Elias “Something For You” A Tribute to Bill Evans
$41/$48/$59/lawn $17

Saturday, August 30, 2 p.m.
A Celebration of Marian McPartland’s 90th Birthday
Live taping for NPR’s “Piano Jazz with special guests TBA
$31/$38/$49/lawn $18

Saturday, August 30, 8 p.m.
Donal Fox: Scarlatti Jazz Suite Project featuring Christian Scott
Dianne Reeves
$44/$57/$70/lawn $19

Sunday, August 31, 2 p.m.
The Eddie Daniels Quartet
Mark O’Connor’s “Hot Swing” with special guest Jane Monheit
$31/$38/$49/lawn $18

Sunday, August 31, 8 p.m.
Terence Blanchard’s “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina)”
with 30 piece orchestra
$44/$48/$59/lawn $17

For additional information, bios and photos on the performing artists, please review the electronic press kit at tanglewoodjazzfestival.org/presskit or contact:

Boston Symphony Orchestra:
Bernadette Horgan (bhorgan@bso.org) and Kathleen Drohan (kdrohan@bso.org)
617-638-9280 (September –June)
413-637-5280 (July and August)

Dawn Singh Publicity:
Dawn Singh
dawn@dawnsinghpublicity.com
505-771-0417 (office)
857-544-0739 (cell)

[Lois Gilbert]

THE GREAT JAZZCORNER/TANGLEWOOD JAZZ FEST GIVEAWAY!

JazzCorner®.com is the proud web partner of the Tanglewood Jazz Festival. To celebrate JazzCorner's continued sponsorship with the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, we have a great giveaway going on.

Grand Prize winner will receive:


VIP tickets and parking for the whole weekend!

2nd prize winners will receive:
2 lawn tickets and VIP parking for all day Saturday
2 lawn tickets and VIP parking for all day Sunday

(Transportation is not included)

Winners will be chosen at random, and will be notified by email and/or phone and announced on JazzCorner's Speakeasy.


Click Here (http://www.jazzcorner.com/contest/tanglewood_2008.php) to Enter

[Valerie]

this is going to be wonderful for all the very fortunate people who are able to attend. wishing . . .

[Lois Gilbert]

Legend, Rising Star Highlight Tanglewood Jazz Festival
Jazz Notes

RIFFS

August 28, 2008

Some critics use chronological age as a crucial standard for measuring talent, just as powerful publicity machines fixate on youth as a prime marketing point for peddling jazz products.

But in the real world of the musicians themselves, there isn't any generation gap, no cultural chasm between Old Masters residing atop Mount Olympus and rising New Masters.

For proof, look only to the lineup this weekend at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, which features pianist Marian McPartland, the legendary 90-year-old pianist/composer, and pianist/composer Aaron Parks, a rising star of 24 already hailed as a visionary force.

Making her annual Labor Day weekend pilgrimage from her Long Island home to Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., McPartland does a live taping of her Peabody Award-winning National Public Radio series "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz" Saturday at 2 p.m. with her guests Nnenna Freelon, Mulgrew Miller and Spencer Day.

In recent years, The Grande Dame of Jazz— an aristocratic-sounding title that no doubt makes this modest, democratically minded native of Great Britain cringe — has used Tanglewood as the forum for her relaxed music- and anecdote-packed interviews with Renee Rosnes, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall, and Norah Jones.

Flourishing for nearly 30 years, "Piano Jazz"— the longest-running cultural show on NPR — has featured more than 500 guests. A dizzying array of luminaries, the guest list ranges from Dizzy Gillespie and Cecil Taylor to Alicia Keys and Willie Nelson, including West Hartford piano phenomenon Brad Mehldau.



Electrifying eclectic
Celebrating his new breakthrough release on Blue Note Records, "Invisible Cinema," Parks, an electrifying eclectic, leads his quartet Friday at 6:30 p.m. at Tanglewood's Jazz Café. An informal, cabaret-style venue, the Jazz Café specializes in emerging talent, often including the best and the brightest of the new wave showing promise of having long-lasting impact on the music.

A Seattle native and piano prodigy who was also a math and computer-science wizard, Parks honed his jazz skills during a five-year stint with the great trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard. After his productive jazz undergrad years with Blanchard, himself a jazz savant, Parks hooked up on tour in a quintet led by a kindred, adventurous, young spirit and fellow rising star, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel.

One bond that McPartland and Parks have in common is the unquenchable desire to keep growing artistically, a need to avoid the status quo, even if that might well be the most commercially and aesthetically secure musical homeland to live in.


McPartland's evolution
As a young World War II war bride, McPartland, who was born in a small village near Windsor Castle, came to the United States with her American husband, Jimmy McPartland, the splendid Chicago-jazz cornet player who swung hard in a traditional, pre-bop style.

Marian was married not only to Jimmy, a flamboyant, hard-drinking, bigger-than-life, charismatic character, but also to Jimmy's brand of music.

Although ebullient and full of life, the old conventions that Jimmy and his pals grooved on so eloquently were already being eclipsed by the 1940s revolution of modern jazz. Specifically by the then seeming anarchy of the emerging avant garde called bebop, led by such upstart iconoclasts and usurpers of the world order as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

Despite her domestic ties, which would seem to wed her to traditional music for life, McPartland, always a free spirit, instead embraced modernism, engaging in a passionate extramarital musical affair with bebop.

Simultaneously, and in her distinctively subtle, courageous way, the young, smart Brit with a classically trained, pellucid keyboard touch, was also smashing sexist barriers in America, becoming a role model for the generations of great women musicians who would follow in her groundbreaking footprints.

On McPartland's new studio release "Twilight World," her 21st album recorded for Concord Jazz, she revels in her wide-ranging taste, interpreting works by a disparate array of composers ranging from Ornette Coleman to Burt Bacharach. There's a salute to Bill Evans whose lush harmonic sense McPartland, a tonal painter, loved as much as Ellington's rich palette and the colorations of numerous early classical favorites, including Delius and Debussy.


Cinematic soundscapes
In Parks' cinematic works — pieces in which the listener's imagination is inspired to write the screenplay — the probing pianist/composer is today's "candidate for change," just as McPartland, with her gradual progressivism and advocacy for new talent, has been for decades.

While tapping into the epic sweep of the jazz tradition, Parks is also immersed in and quite happily influenced by contemporary pop sounds, the music of his time.

So besides Evans, Tyner, Jarrett, Hancock, Corea and a host of influential jazz keyboard titans, his ears and mind are also wide open to virtually anything else out there that might challenge convention. Tuned in to the wavelengths of Radiohead and digging even indie-pop fare from Death Cab for Cutie, he absorbs—for his own creative purposes—anything from Bjork to Zorn.

It's all grist for Parks' creative mill, which grinds exceedingly fine fresh material.

Under the aegis of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood, New England's classic Labor Day weekend jazz bash, marks the official end of the summer jazz festival season.

Bedsides McPartland and Parks, fare ranges from pianist/composer Eliane Elias' fine tribute to Bill Evans in her brainy but heartfelt, "Something for You," to Terence Blanchard's masterful, moving lament for New Orleans, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)"

Here's the lineup, with events in Ozawa Hall, unless otherwise noted:



FRIDAY



6:30 p.m. Aaron Parks Quartet, Jazz Café

8 p.m. Edmar Castaneda Trio with special guest, vibist Joe Locke, and Eliane Elias' homage to Evans



SATURDAY



12:30 p.m. Kate McGarry Trio, an exciting, unconventional singer on a roll, currently stomping and stumping on the Obama bandwagon with her rousing, battle hymn version of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin' "

2 p.m. Taping of McPartland's "Piano Jazz"

6:30 p.m. Jason Palmer Quintet, Jazz Café

8 p.m. Donal Fox: Scarlatti Jazz Suite Project with special guests Christian Scott and diva Dianne Reeves



SUNDAY



12:30 p.m. Spencer Day Quartet, Jazz Cafe

2 p.m. Clarinet King Eddie Daniels' quartet and Violin Viceroy Mark O'Connor's "Hot Swing" with special guest Jane Monheit making her Tanglewood debut.

6:30 p.m. Alex Brown Trio, Jazz Café

8 p.m. Terence Blanchard's requiem for Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, with a 34-piece orchestra. Blanchard's spiritual elegy for his hometown is not only the festival's grand finale, but also a resounding amen marking the conclusion of the summer's jazz festivities.

Information: www.tanglewoodjazzfestival.org. Tickets: 888-266-1200 and www.tanglewood.org.

[Lois Gilbert]

Tributes To New Orleans At Tanglewood Jazz Festival
By CHUCK OBUCHOWSKI

SPECIAL TO THE COURANT

September 2, 2008

New Orleans was on the minds of many performers at this year's Tanglewood Jazz Festival Friday through Sunday in Lenox, Mass.

The mood was predominantly joyful, but a number of bandleaders asked that festival attendees keep the residents of the Gulf Coast in their thoughts as Hurricane Gustav sped toward the region.

Trumpeter and Crescent City native Terence Blanchard capped off the festival Sunday evening with a gut-wrenching performance of his "Tale of God's Will (Requiem for Katrina)," featuring a 35-piece orchestra assembled for the occasion.

Blanchard's extended work, which earned him a Grammy this year, grew out of music he wrote for Spike Lee's documentary "When the Levees Broke."

As noteworthy as his recording is, the live performance proved even stronger, thanks to the interactive chemistry of the trumpeter's core quintet.

Each member also proved to be a formidable soloist, especially tenor saxophonist Brice Winston and drummer Kendrick Scott. But none blew more brilliantly than Blanchard himself. During "Funeral Dirge," for instance, he wove compassionate variations on "Taps" and "Amazing Grace" into his improvisations. His orchestral arrangements were also impressive, by turns mournful and majestic.

Vocalist Dianne Reeves, who headlined Saturday's proceedings at Ozawa Hall, presented one of the festival's standout performances. She also offered words of encouragement for her drummer, Herlin Riley, whose family had just evacuated their homes in New Orleans.

The 51-year-old singer delivered an eclectic set that ranged from a soul-stirring a cappella spiritual to a euphoric scat-infused tribute for her musical mentor Sarah Vaughn. Reeves' vocal command is second to none in the jazz realm. One moment, she might caress a lyric ("Once I Loved") and the next, she could be belting out the blues ("Today Will Be a Good Day.") The latter song elicited one of the most enthusiastic audience responses of the entire weekend.

Reeves was backed by a superb band, which included keyboardist Peter Martin, guitarist Romero Lubambo and bassist Robert Hurst.

Pianist Donal Fox and his Scarlatti Jazz Suite Project performed before Reeves. Fox, who has presented both jazz and classical works at Tanglewood, blended the two genres seamlessly during his hourlong set.

Fox shared melodies with rising vibraphone star Warren Wolf and guest trumpeter Christian Scott. Scott's 2007 CD release, "Anthem," paid homage to his native New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The poignancy of his solos Saturday evening suggested that he remains very attuned to his home city's sonic pulse.

On Sunday afternoon, clarinet wizard Eddie Daniels offered a "message of hope to those who may be affected by the approaching hurricane" with a plaintive reading of Hoagy Carmichael's "New Orleans." His pianist, Tom Ranier, assistant musical director for "Dancing with the Stars," provided strong support here and elsewhere. Drummer Steve Schaeffer pinch hit admirably for Joe LaBarbera, who had hurt his hand in a bicycling accident two days earlier.

Mark O'Connor's "Hot Swing" followed the Daniels Quartet with a delightful set of music inspired by the gypsy jazz of Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt, with bluegrass and folk accents. Dueling guitarists Frank Vignola and Julian Lage mesmerized the crowd with their fleet-fingered excursions, while bassist Gary Mazzaroppi laid down a myriad of enticing grooves. O'Connor fiddled furiously through a batch of familiar favorites, plus some of his own tunes. Vocalist Jane Monheit joined the group for sultry renditions of standards such as "As Time Goes By" and "Honeysuckle Rose."

http://www.courant.com/entertainment/music/reviews/hc-jazzrev0902.artsep02,0,761498.story

[Valerie]

review of festival sounds great. too bad, though, that they misspelled Sarah Vaughan's name when mentioning Dianne's tribute to her!